When you create a new company you have an idea, some sketches, then you develop a product or a service while trying to understand your potential customers by listening and testing. Then the production/service org gets cranking, channels established and sales ensues. All fine and dandy.

But imperceptibly...

Your focus slowly shifts from idea, customer understanding, and free-thinking development to efficient production/service delivery, better channel deals, development restricted to "what you know" (i.e. what your production/service can handle) and your customer relationship shifts from "curious partnership" to "pushy marketing" (adding "social" to the CRM does not count).

That's when you start the slide. OK, many years of success might ensue as you grow, but the customers and the markets are fickle, technological changes will happen, the market might get saturated - and if your focus has shifted from "ideas" to "production" you will eventually be outdated, lose out, and the days of blooming flowers will be replaced by wilting stalks. That's the nature of things.

Why this shift of focus?

Humans (even managers) crave the predictable and will chose it over the unpredictable any day. Easily understandable patterns, especially process patterns, are much preferred to life's randomness. Stable and known processes makes life easy and an urge to shift focus onto the Repeatable and predictable is the result.

[Yep, used it before, now to illustrate doing BRP stuff the ERP way.]

Production, service delivery machinations, human capital management, and supply chain management are examples of Repeatable and predictable processes well served by ERP, SCM, HCM and other such nice TLAs.

This is yet another example of the ERP versus BRP issue. Those functions that are of the BRP type, once the "core", now becomes "support functions" while ERPs becomes the new "core". We like ERP so we try to streamline BRP using rules or rigid processes, but otherwise we minimise them. Over time the pure "BRP mode" startup becomes a rigid "ERP" machine.

Logically speaking; ERP is a subset of BRP. BRP in essence is a set of smaller ERP snippets with participant-chosen paths in between. An MD meets the patient, in itself rather ERP as it requires standard questions and predictable sequences of analysis. When finished, and only then, can the MD decide to send the patient to X-ray (another predictable and Easily Repeatable sequence of activities), to blood tests (another ERP), to another expert, or straight to surgery.

If the BRPs were well supported, even run as processes in some "Repeatable" fashion, then patterns becomes visible and some sort of predictability ensues. That might allow businesses to keep their focus on idea generation, partnering with customers, free-form development - in other words keep their focus on the true core, enhancing the "value we are to deliver".

Or put another way, BRPs are immensely important, the foundation of all business. Resource-wise, that's also where the majority of world wide value creation happens, so it's a win-win. So let's help the BRPs now.

"A study to be published in coming weeks by the Washington-based Brookings Institution finds that bribery, patronage and other public corruption are major contributors to the country's ballooning debt, depriving the Greek state each year of the equivalent of at least 8% of its gross domestic product, or more than €20 billion (about $27 billion)."

and that

"Greece's budget deficit averaged around 6.5% of GDP over the past five years, including a 13% shortfall last year. If Greece's public sector were as clean and transparent as Sweden's or the Netherlands', the country might have posted budget surpluses over the past decade, the study implies."

Obviously, government and health is (almost) all BRP. Put all of that into a proper process based IT system and total accountability and transparency follows. And that, as we know, kills graft, corruption and cronyism swiftly and painlessly.

If you, as a developer and vendor of products, create a new product that has the promise of value for your customer you're onto something.

Say going back a few years starting up Facebook or creating the iPod you would end up with a wildly successful product, tons of happy customers and fat bank accounts.

But if those never happened the world would probably be just the same.

For the supplier of tools and solutions to enterprises, things are a bit different.

If nobody had "invented" the Subprime CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligation) and all it's synthetic cousins the world would have been simpler. If Ford did not implement his assembly line (and nobody else for that matter) we might not be as mobile as we are today.

The purveyors of Enterprise systems and tools have a direct effect on everybody's life, wealth and resource use, and the results are sometimes dramatic.

Michael Lewis' last book "The big short: Inside the Doomsday Machine" arrived from Amazon the other day, and being a big fan of Lewis, a former investment banker and a stubborn sceptic I enjoyed reading more about the subprime crisis.

[Reuters]

But as I'm fully engaged in areas of enterprise software where I found, and try to address, rather obvious holes in the fabric, it also gave me some serious flashes of deja vu:

Barely Repeatable Processes (BRPs) is where at least 60% of the world's value creation takes place, and in those processes about 65% of the time and resources are spent on manually running the processes and not on value creation.

This means that we, World Wide, spend 40% of all resources and time on things that are basically a waste and that could be automated. Or to put it in other words, by automating the BRP flows we could increase World Wide GDP by 67%. Value damned well needed as it could mean much suffering wiped out and much less limited resource use, but now wasted due to old habits and unwillingness to face reality. Just like in 2007.

Those are the facts, that is the disregarded reality.

If you are an Enterprise Software vendor and are not facing this, please do yourself a favour and read about Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers.

Then read about the head-shaking sceptics of 2007 that were pinching their arms (not always able to believe what the saw) while shorting the subprime market with both hands. Know then that I so sympathise with those brave souls while I'm trying to nudge organisations towards the inevitable in today's world.

OK, the Enterprise Software market has started talking about the issue, so far adding "Dynamic", "Social", "Adaptive" and similar prefixes to existing products. For me another deja vu from 2007 when Wall Street added names like "High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage Master Fund" to their existing products. "High", "Structured" are good words, gives hope, just like "Dynamic" and "Adaptive".